BEIS

The North Sea oil and gas industry is the gift that keeps on giving when it comes to emitting dangerous greenhouse gases.

Shell and Exxon are packing up and moving out of the famous Brent oil and gas field in the North Sea. As a final hurrah, almost 800,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide will be emitted as four platforms are dismantled and parts are either left to erode in the ocean or moved onshore and recycled.

That’s equal to about five percent of the UK's North Sea industry’s annual emissions — from the start to very end, the Brent oil field continues to contribute to climate change.

But emitting hundreds of thousands of tonnes of dangerous greenhouse gases including carbon dioxide, nitrous dioxide and sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere is not the only environmental danger that comes with plugging and abandoning the wells.

After a day of speculation about who would move where, prime minister Theresa May has revealed her new cabinet - and like the majority of departments, not much has changed for the climate and energy sector.

The Red Tape Initiative, dubbed the “other Brexit department” by Politico, has so far only met with one government department since it launched in April, DeSmog UK has learnt – the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS).

According to the Red Tape Initiative’s (RTI) director-general Nick Tyrone, the group met once with BEIS officials “a few months ago”.

Tyrone told DeSmog UK that it was a general meeting to simply “put us on their radar”, adding that “we have only met with BEIS to date in terms of government departments”.

The UK has been making reasonable progress down a path towards its legally binding climate goals, but it currently has no plan on how to get over the line.

Such a plan is “urgently” needed, experts warned last week. And new data shows that any strategy must take regional differences into account, with emissions reductions being felt unevenly across the UK.

Prime minister Theresa May has had a busy few days. She continued to reshuffle her front-bench yesterday, moving a number of junior ministers into new roles.

One MP to find himself in a new job this morning is climate minister Nick Hurd, who has been moved to the Home Office.

He is replaced in the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) by Claire Perry, the MP for Devizes in Wiltshire. She was previously assistant whip and a minister in the Department for Transport.

It’s not just a broken record, it’s a broken record that has been glued back together and put on an increasingly wonky turntable.

DeSmog UK previously revealed how climate science denying Lord Donoughue had been wasting ministers' time and taxpayers’ money by spamming the government with 25 questions over 15 months about obscure climate models.

And he’s at it again.

Over the past five months he has asked Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) ministers four times why they are confident saying the climate is warming. In each case, he’s been pointed back to the mass of scientific research that shows it is.

Donoughue’s questions are not a surprise. He sits on the board of trustees of former chancellor Nigel Lawson’s climate science denying think tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF).

The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) appears to have pushed back the release date for a key document outlining its climate plans. Again.

BEIS initially promised the Emissions Reduction Plan would be delivered by the ‘end of 2016’. The BEIS minister for climate change, Nick Hurd, later revised that to the end of the first quarter of 2017.

The UK’s decision to leave the EU and the spectre of Donald Trump’s presidency will not stop the government delivering its emissions reduction plans, climate minister Nick Hurd today told MPs.

Speaking to the House of Commons Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy select committee, he said the current political climate meant ministers would have to make many difficult policy decisions. But he maintained that the UK’s climate goals, entrenched in the Climate Change Act, remained unchanged.

“Brexit is a complication in the sense that we’ve got issues to think through”, he said. These include whether the UK continues to negotiate as part of a European bloc in future negotiations, whether it continues with the EU’s struggling emissions trading scheme, and how the UK participates in a unified European energy market.

The recently culled Department of Energy and Climate Change was actively helping the Oil and Gas Authority (OGA) to achieve its seismic testing aims to increase oil extraction, according to new documents uncovered by DeSmog UK.

The cache of documents obtained through a freedom of information request reveal DECC – which has now been absorbed into the new Department Of Business, Energy and Industrial strategy – was actively involved in getting permits approved in time for seismic testing for oil and gas off the coast of Scotland and northeast England last autumn.

Seismic testing, which involves shooting air from an array of guns under water, is a way of surveying the geology of land under the sea and a precursor to oil exploration.

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